The third U.S. president cut and pasted Scripture to suit his
Enlightenment attitudes

By RICHARD H. OSTLING - THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

It must have been a peculiar sight: The author of the
Declaration of Independence, seated in his Monticello mansion, cutting
the Bible into pieces.

But such was the pastime of Thomas Jefferson during
his last decade, reviving a project he originated while serving as the
nation's third president.

Driven by a desire to select what he considered the
most attractive and authentic material from the Gospels, Jefferson
pasted up 46 pages' worth of his favored passages. He took translations
of the Bible from several languages Greek, Latin, French and English
(the King James Version) - and arranged his selections in parallel
columns.

The English version has now been reissued as "The
Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth" (Beacon
Press, $16, 192 pages). Appropriately, publisher Beacon Press is an arm
of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Jefferson's religious outlook
fit the budding Unitarian movement of his day, though he never formally
affiliated with ft.

The Founding Father's treatment of the Bible,
meanwhile, was radical.

The Old Testament was of no interest to Jefferson,
who regarded Jesus as a reformer of "the depraved religion of his own
country." He further repudiated the writings of the Apostle Paul, whom
he considered the "first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus."

He also eliminated much of the material from the four
Gospels, whose compilers he castigated as "groveling authors" with
"feeble minds." Jefferson censored any hints that Jesus was God, or even
had an unusual relationship with God, and all supernatural events.

"No miracles, no metaphysics, no mystery," summarizes Martin E. Marry
of the University of Chicago. All that's left are probables and
aphorisms. "He made a Socrates out of Jesus."

Deciding what to keep was easy, Jefferson wrote John
Adams, because it was "as distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill."
What was left at the end was "the most sublime and benevolent code of
morals which has ever been offered to man."

He told another correspondent that the discards were
"so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture," and
wrote yet another that they reeked of "vulgar ignorance, of things
impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications."

Today, historians such as Yale University's Jaroslav
Pelikan are struck by the project's "sheer audacity."

Jefferson did not employ technical study of ancient
manuscripts or newly emerging theories from European liberals about
literary sources that might underlie the biblical texts: He simply
picked What he liked.

The Rev. Forrest Church, a New York City Unitarian
pastor, prodded Beacon Press to issue the Jefferson Bible and wrote an
introduction for this edition.

Church first heard about Jefferson's work in 1956,
when his father, Frank Church, was presented a copy on being sworn in as
a U.S. senator. It seems the Government Printing Office had published
Jefferson's Bible in 1904, and the tradition of giving copies to new
senators and representatives lasted for decades thereafter.

Jefferson's Bible is a curious sidelight on an
ever-intriguing figure, whose image has become more controversial in
recent years with claims that he fathered children with a slave, Sally
Hemings.

The third president's place among early American
heroes is also being challenged by the boost his predecessor and great
rival, John Adams, has received from a current biography by David
McCullough.

According to McCullough's account, the two founders
were religious contrasts− Jefferson the iconoclast and individualist,
Adams the devoted Massachusetts Congregationalist who attended church
twice on Sunday and hoped each July 4 would be marked with public
worship services of thanksgiving.

Yet it was Adams who encouraged Jefferson to pursue
his biblical research when they took up an active correspondence late in
life.

Allen Guelzo of Eastern College says Adams' personal
theology was similar to Jefferson's, and the letters between the two
show they had "mutual contempt" for Christian orthodoxy.

Mark Noll, an evangelical historian at Wheaton
College in Illinois, agrees that "Jefferson's respect for the New
Testament needs to be taken seriously," even by those who accept the
miracles that Jefferson himself spurned. Here was a man who studied
Scripture every day during the last 50 years of his life, Noll notes.

Jefferson once said, "There is not a young man now
living in the U.S. who will not die a Unitarian." That forecast was
mistaken.

America was soon swept up in a spiritual revival
known as the second Great Awakening. Nor have liberal ideas about the
Bible ever commanded much support of the masses.

So the Jefferson Bible can be seen as the time-bound
"product of an age, and a class, that was inebriated with Enlightenment
rationalism," says Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious
history at Columbia University.

Marty, from the University of Chicago, thinks
Jefferson's selective use of Jesus is "a good warning" for all readers
of the Gospels.

Everyone who reads the Bible is tempted to be
selective and ignore the "rough stuff," he observes. People who might
scratch their heads over Jefferson "need to ask, what am I doing to
Jesus?"